Reading TIME?s new profile of Bill Gates? ?creative capitalism,? I?m struck first by the notion that the term is redundant on its face. A capitalist?s job is to find new, better, more efficient ways to serve the customers? needs. Creativity is an inherent trait of capitalism. Saying ?creative capitalism? is equivalent to saying ?totalitarian communism.?
Beyond the redundancy, Gates? ideas seem to point to two problems. First, governments don?t allow capitalism to operate as creatively as it could. Second, many capitalists are not as creative as Gates ? or at least as creative as Gates was in his business-oriented, computer system-designing days. Businesses that rely on government restrictions and regulations to preserve their market share have less need to act creatively.
Michael Kinsley does a pretty good job in his column summarizing the arguments challenging Gates? new term. But Kinsley also demonstrates his own failure to recognize the social value of capitalism as it operates in the regular course of business:
As it happens, Gates’ financial history has followed the Friedman philosophy more than his own. Gates founded Microsoft and ran it with legendary single-mindedness for three decades. There was not a lot of energy devoted to lifting up the world’s poor.
What about the people whose use of Microsoft made their work more productive, thus generating more resources for the charitably inclined to donate? What about the people who work directly with the poor? Didn?t Microsoft?s products make their work simpler, freeing them to spend more time doing work that helps the poor directly?
Gates? capitalist ventures did much to help the world?s poor, whether he thought about it or not.
